A solidly told tale of a 22-year espionage operation aimed at foiling attempts by the Soviet Union to pilfer nerve-gas secrets. Though journalist Wise (Molehunt, 1992) works hard to make the story more spectacular than it actually is—after all, the annals of spying are chock-full of long-term agents—he does create a compelling portrait of Joe Cassidy, an American army officer recruited to serve as a “dangle” for the KGB. Cassidy met his Soviet handlers at a YMCA volleyball game in 1959, and for the next 22 years, through a series of secret signals, codes, and message drops like hollowed-out rocks, passed them countless secrets, all carefully vetted by a top-secret Pentagon committee that weighed each bit of information and misinformation. The operation had three purposes: to flush out the Soviet spies Cassidy would come in contact with, to learn how the Soviets functioned in the US, and to occupy them so they would have less time to recruit real agents. In addition, questions the USSR agents asked of Cassidy would reveal gaps in their knowledge that the US agents could exploit. Though Wise’s subtitle is “The Secret War Over Nerve Gas,” only a portion of Cassidy’s career, and this book, deals with nerve gas. Cassidy starts by passing information about the nuclear-power plant at Fort Belvoir, Maryland, then moves on to the nerve-gas arsenal at Edgewood before rounding out his double life by leaking authorized secrets of the US strategic command in Vietnam. A fascinating portrait of Cassidy’s double life, emphasizing particularly the toll the spy’s career had on his personal life over a prolonged period, though Wise falls flatter when placing the significance of Cassidy’s spy operations in the big picture of the cold war.
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50153-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
A children's rights activist's devastating account of the violence and destitution in her own life, which eventually led her to work with bui doi, the street children of Ho Chi Minh City. Noble, with the help of journalist Coram (Caribbean Time Bomb, 1993), describes a childhood in Ireland tormented by her father's alcoholism and neglect, her mother's death, sexual abuse from a relative, and experiences as a street child and in Ireland's harshest girls' reformatory. In her late teens she fled to England, where she endured 14 years in a physically and emotionally abusive marriage. After a breakdown, she left her husband, went into therapy, remarried, started a successful catering business, and, in a dream, realized that she was destined to work with children in Vietnam. In 1989, after her own three children were grown, she went to Ho Chi Minh City. She raised money to build a medical and social center for an orphanage there and to start her own foundation to help street children. Written with painful precision and clarity, the accounts of Noble's own suffering are disturbing and illuminate the source of her empathy for the desperate. But at times the narrative of her adult life is vague and tentative; her children emerge as sympathetic but flat characters, as do individual Vietnamese children. Similarly, she glosses over the end of her second marriage, blandly noting that her husband ``found someone else.'' Toward the end of the book, Noble lapses into trite humanitarian rhetoric, declaring, for instance, that ``we must heal each other like brothers and sisters.'' Such strategies of detachment read oddly, especially given the honesty and intimacy with which Noble has disclosed the emotional hardship of her younger years. Despite some holes, a heartbreaking story of a woman's survival and triumph against terrible odds. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1551-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
British journalist Phillips (Until They Are Five, not reviewed, etc.) takes an inconsistent and often confusing approach to the subject of raising sons. Phillips argues that while women in the past 25 years have made great strides in moving beyond the confines of home and adapting to the demands of the outside world, men have not taken commensurate steps toward becoming part of family life. Consequently, many boys are still raised with absent, inattentive, or violent fathers or without any sort of father figures at all. Indeed, most boys, despite their mothers' efforts, have few role models for communicative, expressive, well-adjusted manhood. Though, happily, this volume is largely free of the nauseating smugness implied by the subtitle, it does have other weaknesses. Many of Phillips's seemingly authoritative and provocative statements are illogical or unsupported; she writes, for instance, that ``these days, little girls have no real reason to envy boys.'' (Many obvious considerations, ranging from discriminatory sports education to high rates of sexual abuse among female children make this a dubious statement.) Worse still, she presents many of her statistics in a confusing, ambiguous way that makes them hard to interpret; for example, she refers to some studies done in the United Kingdom, but often she doesn't specify which country she's talking about, and many of her pronouncements are unsupported by reference to specific studies. Anecdotal evidence is similarly often vague and murky; in one instance she states that a child is East African, then later identifies the same boy as Asian without any explanation. Robert Coles offers a blandly laudatory foreword. Phillips raises some crucial questions for parents of sons, but, disappointingly, this book is too scattered to explore them adequately.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-08734-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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